Archive for the ‘ethics’ Category
Intellectual Property and the Chilean Miners
Filed under: contract, ethics, honesty, intellectual property, international, law, profits, workplace safety |
Comments (1) Last month I posted about some Ethical Issues for the Chilean Miners. There, I pondered the moral force of the contract that the 33 trapped miners signed while still underground, promising each other to share equally the eventual profits of any future publicity. This month, I’m quoted in an article on that same topic, in Canadian Business. Here’s the online version: Intellectual property: Underground dealing in Chile, by Angelina Chapin
The story of “los 33,” the Chilean miners stuck underground for 69 days has all the makings of a good narrative: complication, action, mystery and a happy ending. Presciently, the miners made a pact while they were underground to share whatever profits come from telling their story and are rumoured to have decided to collectively author a book. According to The Guardian, they even had a lawyer send down a contract to make the “blood pact” legal, meaning when Hollywood producers come knocking, they’ll have a whole group to bargain with.
Not much is known about its content, but the circumstances under which the contract was signed have experts wondering about its validity and whether the specifics should be abided by now that they’ve survived the rescue….
The article gives the last word to Toronto-based lawyer Calin Lawrynowicz, who makes a simple, practical suggestion: rather than wonder about the force of the subterranean contract, the miners ought to sit down to talk about it:
Lawrynowicz says, since the miners don’t have 33 lawyers explaining their individual rights, the group should reconvene with an arbitrator to make amendments to the contract, allowing for reductions and benefits in terms of the wealth distribution.
“It’s like a shotgun wedding in Vegas,” he says. “You may be able to have a great relationship after the fact, but have to reconfirm why you got together in the first place.”
Can Employers Tell Employees What to Eat?
Filed under: discrimination, employees, ethics, food, values |
Comments (33) 
All companies want their employees to be team players. But just how far can companies go in requiring that employees ‘toe the line’? Can that demand extend to cultural or religious or moral or dietary requirements?
How As a starting point, consider this story, from CBC News: No meat on menu for Montreal purse maker
A Montreal accessories company has taken its policy of using no animal products beyond the rack and has forbidden its staff from eating meat and fish at work.
A former employee says the policy violated her rights as a non-vegetarian….
(I’ve blogged on unusual forms of employee discrimination before. See Discriminating Against the Non-Blind and “Smokers Need Not Apply”.)
So, is it OK for a company to require that its employees not eat meat? Now, to be more precise, the company in question isn’t forcing people to be vegetarians. It’s just insisting that they not eat meat on the premises. But still, the requirement is an imposition. If an employee loves bologna sandwiches, why should she not be allowed to eat them on her lunch break at work? On the other hand, it’s not exactly a brutal requirement: a place that forbids employees from eating meat is not exactly ipso facto a Dickensian sweatshop. Of course, you might say that the whole conflict could be avoided by careful hiring: only hire people who are willing to uphold the company ethos. But that still amounts to a form of discrimination — and we would still have to ask whether such discrimination is justified or not. Besides, we would still have to worry about cases in which an employee is a devout vegetarian at time of hiring, but then (for whatever reason) changes her dietary habits at some point after being hired.
Whatever your instincts about this particular case, it’s worth performing a consistency test on your own conclusion. Try this: if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, and sympathetic to the company’s no-meat policy, ask yourself whether you would reach the same conclusion if the tables were turned, and a meat-packing company required employees to eat meat and forbade vegetarianism. (“Why would a vegetarian work at a meat-packing plant?” Well, times are tough. Stranger things have happened!) If, on the other hand, you think the company in the story above is engaging in unjustifiable discrimination, ask yourself whether you would reach the same conclusion if the company was one whose product embodied some value that you hold dear — something to do with your own religious or philosophical or political beliefs. That kind of consistency test is a good way to double-check that the conclusion you reach with regard to this particular case is rooted in good reasons, or whether instead your conclusion is based on an undefended bias.
—–
Addendum:
A couple of people have told me my counter-example above is unrealistic — after all, what employer is going to tell you you have to eat meat? That misses the point I was making, which was to suggest to people that we should think up some counter-example that involves some set of values that would challenge what seems to us to be the “obvious” conclusion, here. If you don’t like my example, feel free to suggest one!
—–
Thanks to NW for the story.
Business Ethics Blog’s 5th Blogaversary
Five years ago today, I posted my very first blog entry. It had no real substance, but it was a start. Five years later, I’m still blogging. And given that the average lifespan of a blog is something less than the average lifespan of a fruit fly, I think I now get to call myself a veteran blogger.
Over the last five years, I’ve written over 720 blog entries. I’ve written on topics big and small and ridiculous. I’ve written about the collapse of major financial institutions, and ethical issues for small business, and monkeys working as waiters and the ethics of soccer balls. I’ve written about the auto industry, the wind industry, and the donut industry. I’ve written things that were pretty uncontroversial, as well as things that no one agreed with. And in terms of topics, I’ve covered environmental ethics, workers’ rights, corporate governance, and much more. And my audience has been just as varied. I know for a fact that this blog is read by corporate insiders, by CSR consultants, and by professional colleagues and their students.
And in case you’re wondering, my 3 most popular blog entries from 2010 happen all to be about disasters:
- BP and Corporate Social Responsibility
- Boycotting BP is Futile and Unethical
- Should Trapped Miners Be Paid?
Thanks to all of you who keep reading, commenting, and encouraging. Knowing that you’re out there, reading and reflecting, is what makes this blog worth writing.
MBA Ethics Education: Speaking Up
This is the fourth (and final?) installment in a series of postings on ethics education for MBA students.
The fourth element of MBA ethics education that I want to talk about is the willingness and ability to speak up.
Often one of the biggest barriers to doing the right thing lies in not knowing what to do or say in a hierarchical or group context. Think first of hierarchies. Pretty much all organizations are hierarchical in nature, with each individual answerable to, and performing tasks assigned by, someone in the layer above. In such contexts, when your performance evaluations (and maybe your very job) relies on your boss’s perceptions of you, it can be pretty tough to “speak truth to power,” as the saying goes, even when your conscience says you should. Next think of groups. Business involves a lot of teamwork — a lot of MBA education revolves around that fact — and on teams there can be pressure to conform, to go with the flow, to be a ‘team player.’ But more often than not, if something unethical is about to be done, and least one person on the team realizes that it’s wrong. The question in such cases is whether that one person will have what it takes to speak up. Part of MBA ethics education should be aimed at giving people what it takes to do so.
At a first approximation, I’d say that speaking up when you see something unethical (or maybe just something thoughtless, with potentially bad consequences) requires three things.
First, you need the understanding — the ethical sensitivity, if you will — to notice that something is wrong.
Second, you need to be motivated — you need to care, and you need the courage to act in the face of the pressures of hierarchy and teamwork. You need some understanding of just what your obligations really are. (Among other things, this requires a refusal to indulge in self-serving excuses.)
Third, you need the skills to actually formulate and voice an objection. You need to know things like how to express ethical doubts in a non-threatening way. You need to know how to seek out allies who might share your ethical qualms. And you need a vocabulary in which to express your concerns. In these regards, I highly recommend a book from which I’ve learned a lot, namely Mary Gentile’s recent book, Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right. It is a truly wise piece of writing, and “wise” is not a word I use very much.
None of this is intended to exaggerate the complexity of the simple act of raising one’s voice. But all the available evidence suggests that at least sometimes (and likely too often) it actually is difficult, in organizational settings, to speak up when we get the sense that something isn’t right. And (as discussed in a previous blog entry) it’s just not plausible to think that the people who fail to speak up are all somehow morally defective. Too often, bad things happen because good people don’t speak up. We need to make sure that MBA students (and, surely, others too) graduate with the skills to do so.
MBA Ethics Education: All Decisions are Ethics Decisions
This is the third in a series of blog entries on ethics education for MBA students (the first two are here and here).
One of the key challenges involved in teaching MBA students about ethics is to figure out just what the scope of the topic is. Just which issues are “ethical issues?”
As management guru Peter Drucker once pointed out, “there are no finance decisions, tax decisions, or marketing decisions; only business decisions.”* In other words, decisions that seem to be about a particular aspect of a business cannot (or at least should not) be made as if they have nothing to do with other aspects of the business. And decisions taken by people who are primarily responsible for one area (e.g., marketing) cannot be made as if they have no implications for the work of people in other areas — or as if those decisions could not benefit from input from those other areas. Likewise, the leaders of a company cannot plausibly delegate such decisions and thereby wash their hands of them. Delegation may be necessary, but it can never be complete. A tax decision or a product design decision is not “merely” a tax decision or a product design decision — it is a decision that can affect the fate of the company as a whole.
In a similar vein, it’s worth pointing out that there really is no clear distinction between “ethical” decisions in business and straightforward business decisions. Every decision made within or by a business affects someone. HR decisions have a clear ethical component, as do decisions about things like purchasing (recycled paper or no?) and waste disposal. A decision to allocate resources — money, time, authority — to one person or project is inevitably going to advantage some over others. Even design decisions privilege one view about what is beautiful or useful over others, and what kinds of tradeoffs to make between, for example, price and utility and simplicity. Those are ethical matters. Essentially if any individual or group is helped or harmed, if rights or privileges are at stake, then it is an ethical decision. As a result, it is hard to think of any decision made in business that has no ethical element to it. For this reason, it is wrong to think of “ethical” decisions as some quirky species of decisions. All business decisions are ethical decisions. Of course, it is true that some decisions will present themselves as “ethical” decisions because the stakes are so high, or because the values involved conflict so significantly. So it makes a kind of intuitive sense to call those kinds of decisions “ethical decisions.” But we shouldn’t be misled, by that shorthand way of speaking, into thinking that other decisions don’t have an ethical component.
The dilemma this poses for business education is this: should business students (MBA students in particular) be required to take a separate course in ethics, or should ethics somehow be made part of each of the courses that an MBA student takes? Both approaches have their downsides. On one hand, designating (and requiring) a course on ethics establishes the topic as a serious topic, one to be taught to MBA students alongside Finance and Marketing and Strategy and so on. But if you put ethics into a separate course, you risk ghettoizing the topic, and implicitly encourage professors in other disciplines to say things like, “Don’t worry about the ethics, here — you’ll learn that in your ethics course.” But there are risks inherent in the alternative strategy, too. If you try to weave a bit of ethics into every course, then ethics ends up being taught by profs who may not have any particular expertise in, or passion for, the topic. Indeed, ethics may get pushed to the end of the syllabus, and may have a tendency to fall off the agenda altogether when other topics take longer than expected.
Ideally, an MBA program should probably have both — a dedicated ethics class as well as a concern for ethics woven throughout the curriculum. Ultimately, an integrative approach is required. That means designing a curriculum that finds ways to weave ethics into classes on Accounting and Organizational Behaviour, but that likewise takes Accounting and OB seriously in the way it teaches ethics.
—–
*Drucker is quoted in Roger L. Martin’s 2007 book, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, (p. 79). Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management.
MBA Ethics Education: Avoiding Excuses
Filed under: accountability, education, ethics, excuses, management, MBA |
Comments (9) 
This is the second in a series of blog postings on ethics education for MBA students.
We all want MBA students to leave school with a good chance of being able to do the right thing when the going gets tough. Sometimes, doing the right thing simply requires that we avoid the temptation to do the wrong thing. Positive role models are definitely a good thing, but we also need to understand why things sometimes go wrong.
We can gain insight into that by looking at why it is that people do bad things in the first place. The best short treatment of that topic that I know of, as it applies to Business Ethics, is a paper by my pal Joseph Heath.* Business seems to be, in Heath’s words, a “criminogenic” setting (i.e., a setting that seems to generate criminal behaviour, along with other forms of wrongdoing). If we want to improve ethical conduct in business, we need to understand what characteristics of the world of business are responsible for that pattern.
Heath points out that most of the “folk” theories of wrongdoing have long since been dispensed with by the experts who have spent the most time studying the topic, namely criminologists. Those folk theories hold that wrongdoing is caused 1) by defects of character, 2) by greed, or 3) by deviant values. But the available evidence just doesn’t support any of those explanations. That’s not to say that those things never play a role; it’s just to say that none of those 3 provides anything like a general explanation for wrongdoing. Instead, the existing criminological literature points to the fact that wrongdoers exhibit patterns of “neutralization” with regards to their crimes. That is, they describe their behaviour differently than an observer would. They define words differently, in order to attempt to rationalize their behaviour. In essence, what this allows them to do is to admit that they did the thing, without admitting that it was actually wrong.
The following are the “techniques of neutralization” that Heath gleans from the criminological literature:
- Denial of responsibility — e.g., “I had no choice!”;
- Denial of injury — e.g., “No one really got hurt anyway”;
- Denial of the victim — e.g., “They just got what they deserved.”;
- Condemning the condemners — e.g., “Those who accuse me are just out to get me.”;
- Appeal to higher loyalties — e.g., “I have a family to support!”;
- “Everyone else is doing it;”
- Claim to entitlement — e.g., “I built this company, I can do what I want!”
The final section of Heath’s paper deals briefly with business ethics education. He argues that what we know about the genesis of wrongdoing has clear implications for what we teach in business ethics classes. The techniques of neutralization are psychologically attractive, but in most cases they are logically faulty. So we need to teach business students to recognize them, and to recognize why they are faulty. (I’ve got lots to say on how to do that, but I’ll leave it for another time.)
Even more important, perhaps, Heath nods to the role of managers as designers. (See also yesterday’s blog entry, “MBA Ethics Education: Designing the Designers”.) The fact that managers are involved in the design of the work environments they manage implies that they need to be taught how to incorporate an understanding of the significance of techniques of neutralization into their design choices. They need the tools with which to build work environments in which certain kinds of excuses, in other words, are psychologically unattractive and socially unacceptable.
_______
*See Joseph Heath’s “Business Ethics and Moral Motivation: A Criminological Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 83:4, 2008. Here’s the abstract.
Conflict of Interest at the Business/Politics Interface
Filed under: accountability, conflict of interest, ethics, government, politics, taxpayers |
Leave a comment People tend not to trust big business. And they tend not to trust the world of politics. But when those two worlds intersect, people really get nervous.
Witness, for example, this story by Eric Lipton, for yesterday’s New York Times: A Journey From Lawmaker to Lobbyist and Back Again
The story is about Dan Coats, a former corporate lobbyist recently elected to the US Senate.
Dan Coats, then a former senator and ambassador to Germany, served as co-chairman of a team of lobbyists in 2007 who worked behind the scenes to successfully block Senate legislation that would have terminated a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cash flow to Cooper Industries.
…
As part of the Republican wave in this year’s midterm elections, Mr. Coats will join the Senate again and is seeking a coveted spot on the Finance Committee, the same panel that tried to shut the tax loophole and that the Obama administration has pushed to again consider such a move.
The worry alluded to in the NYT piece, but not explored in any depth, is that of conflict of interest. The vague worry is roughly that there is — well, some sort of conflict between Mr. Coats’ old allegiances and his new position.
Coincidentally, here’s a piece (just published today) that I wrote about conflict of interest in the Canadians Prime Minister’s Office: Conflict of Interest in the PMO: Just What is the Worry?
The main point of my article is neither to accuse nor to absolve. It’s to point out that we need to get clear on just what the worry is, in any particular situation. A vague worry that “something ain’t right, here” is fine as a starting point, but if we want to go beyond that, and if we want to prescribe smart solutions, we need to get clearer about what the problem is.
Some scholarly definitions cast the matter as a question of judgment. Under such definitions, conflict of interest is said to occur if there is good reason to think that the judgment of the individual in question will be impaired. In other words, will she be able to exercise judgment impartially, or will her judgment be clouded by other factors that ought to, for ethical reasons, be excluded?
Other definitions frame the issue as one about the interests of those being served: a conflict is said to occur if there is reason to doubt the individual’s ability to faithfully serve the interests of those they are sworn to serve.
Whatever their differences, both definitions focus on service. We worry about conflict of interest when the incentives present in a given situation give us reason to doubt the quality of an individual’s service as a trusted advisor or decision-maker. This analysis suggests that, whatever the Conflict of Interest Act may say, the real question in the case of Wright is whether the judgment that he exercises in his capacity as the chief of staff can reasonably be expected to be skewed (consciously or subconsciously) by the interests of his former, corporate, employers.
The same could, and presumably should, be asked about Mr. Coats. But, as always, I am at pains to point out that a conflict of interest is a situation, not an accusation. If there is reason to worry about Mr. Coats’ judgment, that is not a matter of impugning Mr. Coats’ integrity. Rather, it is a matter of considering what measures (if any) are sufficient to make sure that the value of his service to the public outweighs the risks.
MBA Ethics Education: Designing the Designers
As a Visiting Scholar at the Rotman School of Management (more specifically at the Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics and Board Effectiveness), I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we educate tomorrow’s business leaders. This is the first of a series of blog entries on that topic.
Clearly, what we need to teach future managers (especially MBA students) about ethics depends crucially on what we understand the role of managers to be. And with regard to management ethics, we should carefully distinguish two very different educational needs, rooted in managers’ two very different roles.
One role managers play is that of decision-maker, and so the first issue to consider with regard to managerial ethics concerns the ethical behaviour of managers themselves. In this regard, business schools are in the business of educating decision-makers. Such being the case, it makes sense to teach MBA students about various ethical theories, about what can be learned from various scandals, about social expectations with regard to business, and so on. We want to instill in MBA students that doing the right thing matters, and give them the skills to figure out what that requires of them. (Relatedly: I blogged recently about the MBA Oath and the question of professionalizing management.)
The other role played by managers is that of a designer: managers essentially are tasked with designing organizations (or parts of organizations — teams, branches, functional units, and so on). And so the other key ethical issue with regard to managers is whether they will have the skills to design business units that make it easier, rather than harder, for subordinates to act ethically. MBA students, then, need to be taught about the ethically-salient elements of organizational design. They need to be taught, for example, about the kinds of incentive structures and the kinds of organizational cultures that foster rather than frustrate, good ethical decision-making, so that they can try to design such structures and cultures in the workplace.
But it’s worth noting that even individual ethical decision-making (and not just the design of decision-making contexts) itself involves design. As Caroline Whitbeck points out (in an excellent article* that I recently taught to my Business Ethics class), there is a very strong analogy to be made between ethical decision-making and the kind of design thinking that engineers engage in. Ethical decision-making, like engineering design, involves an attempt to solve a problem, in order to achieve certain objectives, taking into consideration a set of constraints. And it involves attempting to find a good solution, in a situation in which there may be multiple adequate solutions, no clear best solution, but many clearly unacceptable ones. Ethical decision-making, in other words, is precisely not like a multiple-choice exam question. Real ethical questions are very seldom of the form “Should we choose option A or option B?” More often, the question is “what options are feasible?” And, “what would those options look like, in practice?” And, “what series of steps will that option include, and what will happen if we do X and so-and-so does Y in response?” Ethical decision-making is a design process.
So, whether we are thinking about training MBAs to make particular decisions, or training them to build the contexts in which particular decisions are to be made, business schools are in the business of designing designers. The question, then, is not just which ethical principles ought to be used as the building materials of good decisions, but what ethical principles ought to govern the design process itself.
__________
*Caroline Whitbeck “Ethics as Design: Doing Justice to Moral Problems” (from Hastings Centre Report, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1996).
Business Ethics & Compliance 3: FCPA, Ethics Training, Social Media
I’m just back from New York, where I attended the Conference Board’s Business Ethics and Compliance Conference, as a guest of the organizers.
This is the third of 3 blog entries about the event.
This morning I saw two presentations. The first was by Matthew Tanzer, VP and Chief Compliance Counsel at Tyco. Tanzer’s talk was nominally about “Communicating and Managing FCPA Risk.” (The FCPA, or Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, is what makes it a crime under U.S. law for an American company to engage in bribery overseas, regardless of whether there are laws against bribery in the country in which the bribery takes place.) But more generally Tanzer’s talk was about the very sophisticated program Tyco has in place to train its roughly 110,000 employees on ethics & compliance. Tyco’s program includes a “Vital Values” newsletter, online training modules, and having 100% of its employes — many of them in far-flung branch offices in something like 60 countries — sign the company’s Code of Conduct every year. My initial critical thought about the latter: how much value is there in having people merely sign a Code of Conduct. Signing doesn’t reliably indicate understanding. But Tanzer’s justification was a good one: the ordeal involved in achieving a 100% signature rate signals commitment. In his words, “It says to employees that we’re serious about this.” Add to that the fact that something like 50,000 employees go through online training every year, and you start to see that Tyco does take this stuff seriously. (Oh, and on the topic of the relationship between ethics & legal compliance, Tanzer’s advice to the audience, most of whom have legal training: Not everyone in your organization is a lawyer, so don’t focus on law. Focus on ethics.)
The other presentation I saw this morning was by Douglas Smith, a lawyer with McGuireWoods LLP, on the impact of social networks and new communications technologies. Smith opened some eyes in the audience, I think, with regard to various ways in which employee use of social media can result in risks for their employers. But he also had words of caution for companies tempted to peek at employees’ (or prospective employees’) use of social media. Even when doing so doesn’t constitute actual invasion of privacy, it can, for example, result in employers seeing personal information that they are not legally allowed to use (under, e.g., Title 7 of the US Civil Rights Act).
(One point of criticism if Smith’s talk: given that it was a talk about new communications technologies at a conference on ethics & compliance, I would have liked to hear his thoughts on the positive ways in which companies are using blogs and Twitter to communicate with customers, critics, and other stakeholders.)
—-
p.s. here are direct links to my last 2 blog entries from the conference:
Business Ethics & Compliance and Business Ethics & Compliance 2.
Ethics: Definition
Filed under: corporate citizenship, CSR, definitions, ethics, sustainability |
Comments (20) 
“Ethics” can be defined as the critical, structured examination of how we should behave — in particular, how we should constrain the pursuit of self-interest when our actions affect others.
“Business Ethics” can be defined as the critical, structured examination of how people & institutions should behave in the world of commerce. In particular, it involves examining appropriate constraints on the pursuit of self-interest, or (for firms) profits, when the actions of individuals or firms affects others.
The “critical” and the “structured” parts of those definitions are both important:
- Ethics is critical in the sense of having to do with examining and critiquing various moral beliefs and practices. (In other words, it’s not just about describing people’s values or behaviour, though that can be a useful starting point.) Ethics involves looking at particular norms and values and behaviours and judging them, asking whether various norms and values are mutually contradictory, and asking which ones matter more in what sorts of situations.
- Ethics is structured in the sense that it’s not just about having an opinion about how people should behave. Everyone has opinions. Ethics involves attempting, at least, to find higher-order principles and theories in an attempt to rationalize and unify our diverse moral beliefs.
For practical purposes, ethics means providing reasoned justification for our choices & behaviour when it affects others, and reasoned justification for our praise or criticism of other people’s behaviour.
Now, nothing above constitutes an argument. I’m just explaining roughly the proper use of the term “ethics.” There are, of course, other uses of that term — some of them arguably regrettable. (Some people in business and government, for example, take the word “ethics” to refer exclusively to the rules set out in various “ethics laws” that govern the behaviour of individuals in positions of responsibility, rules about conflict of interest, bribery, and so on.)
So, here comes the contentious part. I’m not sure it really is or should be contentious, but some people are bound to disagree with it.
The breadth of the topic “business ethics,” as defined above, means that other, related ideas like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and corporate citizenship and sustainability are in fact sub-topics within the broader topic of business ethics. That’s not to diminish the importance of those sub-topics. But it’s worth keeping in mind, because it means that a focus on any one of those topics means setting aside potentially-important issues that fall under a different heading. This is especially true when companies (and consultants) focus on just one term. When they do that, it’s worth wondering, and maybe asking pointedly, about the stuff they’re leaving out.
—
Edited for clarity in October, 2011.
The Business Ethics Blog 